Cadario Lecture, Featuring Robert Putnam “The Widening Opportunity Gap”
April 7, 2014 | By Public Policy Admin |
Growing up Rich and Growing up Poor in America Today
The School of Public Policy and Governance presents Robert D. Putnam in the Annual Cadario lecture. Putnam is the best-selling author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, and Better Together: Restoring the American Community. Mr. Putnam is also the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.
The School of Public Policy and Governance presents Robert D. Putnam in the Annual Cadario Lecture titled “The Widening Opportunity Gap: Growing up rich and growing up poor in America today”.
The Hon. Senator Hugh Segal, Master-elect, Massey College, will respond to Prof. Putnam’s address. Professor Carolyn Hughes Tuohy, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Senior Fellow, SPPG, will moderate.
Abstract:
Americans historically have accepted relatively high levels of inequality of outcome, but our widely-shared foundational creed that “all men are created equal” demands that one’s own merits, not one’s parents’ rank or status, determine success. The meritocracy at the heart of the American Dream is now threatened by a sharp decline in opportunities for the next generation of kids from poor backgrounds. Class gaps have always been a reality in America, but our research reveals robustly growing class gaps since the 1990s across a wide range of predictors of children’s life success—parental investments of time and money, youthful social capital, such as sports or church attendance or social trust, test scores and educational attainment, and even measures of health, such as childhood obesity. Deeply troubling racial gaps remain, of course, but this opportunity gap is about class, not race, and it is growing. Because the prospect of upward social mobility is so central to American culture, the growing youth class gap poses the most fundamental challenge facing American society today.
Bio
Robert D. Putnam is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard, where he teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses, and is the 2013-14 Distinguished Visiting Professor at Aarhus University (Denmark). Professor Putnam is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the British Academy, and past president of the American Political Science Association. In 2006, Putnam received the Skytte Prize, the world’s highest accolade for a political scientist, and in 2012, he received the National Humanities Medal, the nation’s highest honor for contributions to the humanities. Raised in a small town in the Midwest and educated at Swarthmore, Oxford, and Yale, he has served as Dean of the Kennedy School of Government. The London Sunday Times has called him “the most influential academic in the world today.”
He has written fourteen books, translated into twenty languages, including the best-selling Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, and more recently Better Together: Restoring the American Community, a study of promising new forms of social connectedness. His previous book, Making Democracy Work, was praised by the Economist as “a great work of social science, worthy to rank alongside de Tocqueville, Pareto and Weber.” Both Making Democracy Work and Bowling Alone are among the most cited publications in the social sciences worldwide in the last half century.
TICKET PRICE: $20 General, $10 UofT affiliated, Free for U of T students.
CONTACT INFO: public.policy@utoronto.ca
Event Date
April 7, 2014
5:30pm – 7:00pm
Location
MacMillan Theatre, 80 Queen’s Park,
Toronto, ON
Program